FB TOP TEN: ENGINE INNOVATIONS
It’s 35 years – 35! – since the first proper modern water-cooled, 16-valve superbike engine appeared. Yep, folk can go on about Honda’s 1969 CB750 and Kawasaki’s 1972 Z1 all they like, but it was Kawasaki’s 1984 GPZ900R Ninja which really brought high performance biking into the modern era. Many of the features in that 115bhp engine had been around for a while – multi-valve cylinders, water-cooling, double overhead cams. But this was the first time it all came together in one amazing hit.
That bike – in essentially stock form – finished first and second at the 1984 Isle of Man TT proddy race, so it was pretty obvious what direction fast bikes would be taking from then on. Competing tech, like big two-strokes, turbos and rotary engines, were finally dumped, and before we knew it, every big sports bike used a GPZ-style inline-four motor.
Even now, three-and-a-half decades later, we’re still using them – and they’re making twice as much power. The 2019 ZX-10RR claims 213bhp at its peak, with an extra 91cc and more than three decades of advances in engine design.
How did we get here then? What are the big steps taken by modern bike engines? Let’s find out…
PACKAGING
Honey I shrunk the motor
Look at an old inline-four engine from the 1980s – the GPZ900R, Yamaha’s FZR1000 or Honda’s CBR1000F, say. The first thing you’ll notice is how enormous and sprawling they are compared with a current design. The basic layouts in many cases dated back to air-cooled dinosaurs of the 1970s, because it’s cheaper to bodge on water-cooling and 16-valve heads to your old crankcases than make an all-new engine. Loads of external steel water and
